I am attempting to load in a .gif file to serve as a sprite for one of my game objects. To do this I use the line :

myImage = Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getImage("razz.gif");

However, this appears to introduce some Weird Stuff (tm). This is a basic top-down shooter, with a map of tiles. A tile that does not contain any other game object just draws a green square. But when I call my initialising method, it just draws the tiles to the first one containing a sprite, then stops drawing. Some considerable time later, it will start drawing the .gif for the sprites.

This seems to be a problem with the loading time for the gif file, but I'm not entirely sure how to deal with it. Is there a way to say 'stop executing until the image is fully ready'?

Now, the gif is an animated one (in point of fact it's a smiley ) and that works well. But every so often the animation will cease and a blank red square will be drawn. This does not seem to occur at the end of every animation cycle, so I'm really not sure what might cause it. Ideas?

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